Doing Our Best Project Work….With Less

By Vicki Wrona, PMP:

In the great symphony of life, everyone plays an important role, from the conductor to each instrument. Such it is with project management. If we have a team member that doesn’t pull their weight on the project, either by not delivering, by being tardy, producing incomplete or sloppy work, etc. it brings the whole team down.

Can the team still deliver a successful project with a team member like this? Sure. But at what cost? If it takes more effort on the part of certain individuals or creates more discourse among the team, is it worth it?

We may not always have the luxury of replacing a person, but better to replace that person or remove them altogether than to suffer. However, as managers or as fellow team members, we are often too slow to do this or to escalate the problem to the appropriate authorities. We fear the outcome. How can the project get done without this person or this role? Maybe it cannot, and so we must make do. But maybe it can still get done, and the energy saved by not having to constantly hound this person can be put toward doing their work instead.

In the long run, we may expend less energy to produce the same product. To the untrained person, that sounds like more work, but actually it isn’t. Producing more work with fewer resources is what management wants us to do and is almost always seen as a burden. However, we may possibly be able to do that without having to put in more work individually.

Again, how much energy do we expend by worrying about a troublesome or unreliable person on the team, by constantly following up with them, by chasing them down when they don’t answer, and by scrambling to produce work when they don’t come through? It sounds risky to remove them altogether, but maybe it’s the easier thing to do after all.

What do you think?

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